Exploring the intersections of social class, education and identity

“privilege meme”

The organization Class Action offers terrific resources on class and classism, and in their recent newsletter Building Bridges, they write of the important discourse sparked by Peggy McIntosh’s piece, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (which you can easily find via Google, but since many of the copies on the web may be bit casual about copyright, I’m not linking here), even as they note that many of the items on her list are experienced by middle class whites, but not by lower income white people.

The exercise that Will Barratt and his colleagues developed that morphed into that “privilege meme” a few months ago was one take on developing a parallel class privilege list.

In the Building Bridges newsletter, the Class Action people offer another take on a middle class privilege list, They acknowledge that this list is far from definitive, given the many ways that race and gender complicate class privilege.

Thus, they invite others to contribute their own lists at <privilege at classism.org>. I’d invite you to cc me in the comments below.

Middle Class Privileges

The “better people” are in my social class; I know this because they are the ones reported on and valued in the media and in school.

People appear to pay attention to my social class; we set the standard.

When I, or my children, are taught about history, people from my social class are represented in the books.

I can swear, or dress in second-hand clothes, or not answer letters, without having people attribute these choices to the bad morals, the laziness, poverty, or illiteracy of my class.

The neighborhoods I can move to, where I feel “at home”, typically have better resourced schools.

When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization”, I am shown that people of my class made it what it is.

I can be pretty sure that my children’s teachers and employers will tolerate them if they fit school and workplace norms; my chief worries about them do not concern others’ attitudes toward their class.

I can talk with my mouth full and not have people put this down to my class.

I can do well in a challenging situation without being called a credit to my class.

I am never asked to speak for all people in my class.

I can remain oblivious of the language and customs of poor and working class people who constitute the world’s majority without feeling in my class any penalty for such oblivion.

My culture gives me little fear about ignoring the perspectives and powers of people in other classes.

I am not made acutely aware that my shape, bearing or body odor will be taken as a reflection of my class.

I can worry about classism without being seen as self-interested or self-seeking.

I can be late to a meeting without having the lateness reflect on my class.

If I have low credibility as a leader, I can be sure that my class is not the problem.

I can read recipes and purchase whatever ingredients or appliances they might call for.

I can invite my friends out for an evening and not have to think about whether they can afford it or not.

That Privilege Meme simply will not die, moving now among a number of blogs written by people of color, and generating infinitely more complicated discussion about class, gender, and race than were evident in the early rounds rounds of denial, discrediting, and general disdain of the very idea of class privilege.

I’m finding the discussions in this round of the meme to be particularly intriguing, because in every single conference session I’ve done on class, people in the audience (both white and people of color) stand up to argue that if we open the door to talking about class, whites will have an excuse to simply stop talking about race.

I’ve always found this puzzling because in my experience (and I’d love to learn that my experience has been particularly limited), few whites have gotten beyond conflating race with poverty, and fewer still have any interest in talking about class whatsoever.

I’ve yet to hear anyone in these sessions argue that people of color might, themselves, have considerable interest in talking about class and might, indeed, deepen the broader conversation about class privilege.

There’s been a refreshingly multi-faceted and thoughtful conversation about the privilege meme, schooling, and class going on over at this Live Journal blog (and I say this not only because they’ve been sending steady traffic here!).

Speaking of that “privilege meme” that’s still buzzing around out there after oh so many days (even a blogger from Atlantic Monthly chimed in today, critiquing the exercise from her perspective as the graduate of a private school attended by “ultra-privileged” classmates for not reflecting her particular experiences)…

The protocol of the meme has been to “bold” the items that apply to you and to then say a bit about your background.

When something like this is done in person –as it was designed to be –a moderator can facilitate discussion among those whose lives have followed different paths and ensure that all voice are heard. A central point of an exercise like this is typically to generate conversation among the people in the room that would not take place otherwise.

But the people in this virtual room who keep batting this thing around seem to be people from very similar backgrounds.

While I’ve seen all sorts of assumptions made about how others live and what they value (and about how easy it would be for parents anywhere to find free museums to take their kids too “if they cared enough”. Have these people ever been outside a city?), I’ve not yet seen, in all of these hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts and comments, anyone who has thought to say:

So, most of the things I’m reading on this are written people who “score” relatively highly on this meme.

But I wonder: what does this all look like to people whose backgrounds included very few of these things?

In early November, Jeanne, on herSocial Class and Quakers blog, posted a version of a staff development exercise on class privilege created by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Indiana State University. I won’t copy the exercise here; you can see it on Jeanne’s blog. In the original exercise, participants are asked to “step forward” if they experienced any of a number of elements of class privilege (parents graduating from college, staying in hotels on vacation) growing up.

Jeanne’s post generated a lot of discussion among other Quaker bloggers. The discussion was generally thoughtful, honest, and self-reflective, with a number of people remarking that they’d never before thought of some of these things as related to “privilege”.

But, the exercise then went viral, and over the past few days, my Technorati and Google blog alerts have been humming with hundreds of blog posts spreading what has now become a “meme”.

I’m fascinated. Why now? Why this list? In the year that I’ve been following blogs on social class, nothing else has generated this many posts, comments, and sometime vicious reactions.

And I fascinated by the almost universal denial of privilege among all of these people sitting at their computers with the leisure time to participate in such exercises.

It would be futile to link to even a fraction of those blogs here because they’re still popping up by the dozens as I type. You can find hundreds of them simply by Googling “privilege meme”.

And I’ll leave it to others to deliberate about whether Will and his colleagues came up with the “right” list of life experiences to signify privilege, as many of these bloggers do (even though many of these cynical critiques smack of self-interest).

But I’m highly intrigued by the seemingly contradictory responses in many of these posts.

One the one hand, nearly everyone in this current round of posts denies that they are privileged, regardless of their family circumstances (“Original art on our walls? Well, it’s not as if we had to pay for it! My parents were friends with many artists!”). Very, very few of the hundreds of people who are participating in this have simply said “well yeah, I was really privileged growing up and I’ve always understood that.”

On the other hand, many of these writers simply assume — and often viciously assert — that they and their families are “better” than people who did not grow up with the sorts of things on the list, because any parents who worked hard and cared about their kids would obviously provide the same things that they, themselves, enjoyed as children.

This woman, for example, after writing clever and funny responses to most of the items, took it upon herself to declare people like my parents unfit to raise children because they didn’t provide the travel, the trips to museums, and the college tuition that her parents provided for her:

So, yeah, I was middle-class to the core. Or to put it another way, my parents had worked their socks off to establish themselves in life and give their children a good start. And any parents who don’t do that are rotten parents and unworthy of the name of parent.

There is, of course, a smattering of outright denial of class differences:

In particular, I suspect that most undergraduates, with the exception of the very poorest, have had a substantially similar life experience up to that point in their lives. True, some had cars and TVs and took fancier vacations and ate at nicer restaurants, and some did not. But those differences in child and young adult life experience are pretty small: in our modern industrialized democracy, everyone (again, with the exception of the poorest) is working off pretty much the same script at that age.

Others trivialize a number of the items in the exercise and demonstrate an almost remarkable lack of understanding of the circumstances of many lives:

As an aside, one of the things that gets me about this “privilege” exercise is how actually divorced from class it is, primarily because so many of the privilege indicators are trivial consumer items well within the reach of all but the most poor among us. My gas station convenience store has pay-as-you-go cell phones for less than it costs to pay for an XBox game; at this point it’s not a mark of privilege for a teenager to have one. I can go to Wal-Mart and pick up a TV for under $100 or a desktop computer for $300; not very good ones in either case, but that’s not the point.

The price of an XBox game is the metric by which we think about affordability?

Many, many writers were offended by the very taint of privilege, as was this young man:

I would have resented the hell out of this as an undergrad. Why should I be accused of privilege in a faux-Marxist confessional because my mom was a schoolteacher and my dad was an adjunct prof? We sure as hell didn’t have a lot of money when I was a kid – I never had a car until grad school – but I scored high on all the “did your parents give a crap?” questions. The point of this should have been to exhort the kids who didn’t have good role models to read to their future kids, not have the kids with good role models step forward like some sort of transgressors.

Role models?

Also offended was this middle-aged mother, who goes on to argue that anyone can work their way into the same privileges enjoyed by her daughter:

Wow. I guess that puts our family smack in the middle of the extended-pinky, capitalist-pig, sweatshop-owning upper class. That kind of sucks. I grew up in the (late) 60’s and 70’s, so being called “rich bitch” was the very worst insult of all.

She went on to dismiss such exercises as simply annoying as hell.

Yet others can’t distinguish between the privilege of choosing one’s lifestyle and the lives of material deprivation lived by others. Claiming honest confusion about whether he experienced privilege as a child was this blogger:

My family owned 2 homes all my life. One was wherever my dad was working and the other was the family farm which had been in our family for well over 100 years. We lived on or very near big water all my childhood and had boats (yes plural) both sail and power. For a number of years we even owned an island. Yup a for real ‘island’ in the Chesapeake Bay. One plus mile long by about a half mile wide. We went to both public and private schools. We always had very good medical insurance.

But… We all also wore hand-me-downs clothes, we rode hand-me-down bikes, we never vacationed ANYWHERE but the family farm. And those boat(s) we had… we spent far more time working on the engines to keep them running than we did riding around in ‘em. My father kept us long on hugs, but very short on pocket money. We had to earn everything we wanted.

He may still be wondering, but that owning an island thing pretty much clinches it for me. Privileged.

So after skimming scores of these things this week, I’m left wondering: How is it that so many people can simultaneously disdain the poor and working class while also pretending to live in solidarity with “real” people who had to work for everything that they have? To argue that while they simultaneously enjoyed a great deal of material privilege growing up, they are not “privileged” people because their parents worked hard for what they had?

How, in this age of multi-media and instantaneous communication, have so many people grown up oblivious to the circumstances of other people’s lives?

And in the end, how do we explain all of this defensiveness among those who clearly have attained the Great American Dream?